Find Your Perfect Audience

30th September 2016

So you’ve spent time writing copy for your marketing collateral, you have the perfect imagery that represents your business brand and the principles your business stands for, you also have a fantastic offer that no-one could resist; but after your mailing campaign goes out you don’t get the response you thought you would.

Has this ever happened to you? It’s frustrating when you spend time and money on marketing and you receive little to no response.

The key thing to remember is this: it doesn’t matter how fantastic and attention grabbing your advertising is if the wrong people are seeing it.

Scatter gun approaches such as leaflets put through doors, billboard advertising, and even internet banners and ads may reach a lot of people, but they are probably not the right people.

What you need is more effective targeting.

Effective Targeting

Targeting means identifying the group of people who are most likely to purchase your product, or use your service and then contacting those people through advertising.

One of the best ways to contact people is using direct mail, a reliable advertising medium it still outperforms all digital channels combined by a massive 600%*. Direct mail allows you to use the contact (and other) details of consumers or businesses to reach the right people, all you have to do is select the criteria.

Think about the appropriate age group to promote your business to; if your business promotes jet skiing holidays you might want to market primarily to a younger audience rather than the over 50s crowd.

What income must someone have to be able to afford what you’re offering? Somebody on a minimum wage probably isn’t interested in luxury chocolates or expensive hotels. This works in reverse too, a high earner probably won’t want to shop at a low cost supermarket.

What parts of the country is your business able to supply? If what you are offering is extremely localised or limited to certain areas then you need to be targeting those areas.

You can always profile your existing customers, i.e. find out more about them, how old are they, what do they like about your business, you can then find similar people to market to.

Personalisation

Even after you’ve eliminated those people who won’t be interested in your business, product, or service, your perfect audience will probably still have a combination of different demographics, and this is where personalisation comes in.

Personalisation means using data insights to power the design of mail items so they are directed at the individual receiving the, studies have shown that a personalised item is up to 80%* more likely to be read by the recipient.

Personalisation might include using the recipient’s name in a large headline on the front of your mailing, or changing the image on the front so it is relevant to their demographic. All this can be done in one mailing run if you use a personalised mailing solution or contact a direct mailing house who specialise in personalisation such as DMP.

Summary

Marketing to people who are not interested in your business is a waste of time, effort, and money which is better spent identifying those people who will be interested.

For more information on data insights check out Insights on Data Insights, and if you’d like to learn more about personalisation you can look at What is data personalisation?.

*Statistics from the DMA Response Report 2015.